I am looking to upgrade my RAM on my two-year old Hewlett-Packard Pavillion DV9000T which came with two 1GB sticks. I am thinking of replacing one with a 4GB stick. I was looking at http://www.pricewatch.com/system_memory/ What is the difference between DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. Also what is the 4-digit number like 5300? How do I know what I need to buy?

Crucial's "Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool" says that my computer will not take any more memory than it came with (2 1GB sticks). This does not make sense to me.

coreymanshack

Your board does not support more than 2GB of memory. You cannot upgrade. Sorry.

Pepperfan

You are maxed out on ram. So sorry.

On the bright side unless you have gone to a 64 bit OS it wouldn't have helped much. Windows 32 will do 4 gig total which means that you will max out at 3 to 3.5 for you to use.

Charles

Tony The Tiger

coreymanshack wrote:

Your board does not support more than 2GB of memory. You cannot upgrade. Sorry.

What would happen if I bought more RAM? This does not make sense to me. I thought my board had the option of up to 4GB OEM when I bought it. I don't think I bought the most RAM I could buy. How could I have had the option to buy 4GB OEM and now be maxed at 2GB?

Tony The Tiger

Pepperfan wrote:

You are maxed out on ram. So sorry.

On the bright side unless you have gone to a 64 bit OS it wouldn't have helped much. Windows 32 will do 4 gig total which means that you will max out at 3 to 3.5 for you to use.

Charles

Even 4GB seems like it should be a lot better than two. When I have certain types of windows open such as an ESPN basketball box score that is refreshing every 60 seconds, my computer starts acting up. I thought more RAM would help.

Pepperfan

Tony,

You can try and go to 4 gigs of ram but you will not get 4 gigs of ram to use. The best you can hope for is 3.5 gigs to show up to windows x32. You can check by looking under the control panel and system. More likely is a number closer to 3 gigs. It may be the reason that the motherboard is reporting to the crucial.com tool that you can use only 2 gigs is HP didn't want a bunch of calls from people freeking out because their 4 gigs of ram only shows as 3 gigs. That is not the computers fault just 32 bit windows.

Of course the other option is just buy the 4 gigs of ram install them and see what happens... I would make sure you can return the memory if it doesn't work out.

Charles

Pepperfan

I guess I should explain a little more about the 32 bit windows memory limitation. Windows 32bit can only address 4 gigs of ram. <----- See the period? That means if you have 2 gigs of ram in your computer and your video card uses 512mb then windows has 1.5 gig of memory left that it can use. There are other things in your system that can use memory also and they are harder to know about but they all subtract from that 4 gig maximum amount of memory that your windows 32 bit can use.

Charles

Tony The Tiger

Pepperfan wrote:

I guess I should explain a little more about the 32 bit windows memory limitation. Windows 32bit can only address 4 gigs of ram. <----- See the period? That means if you have 2 gigs of ram in your computer and your video card uses 512mb then windows has 1.5 gig of memory left that it can use. There are other things in your system that can use memory also and they are harder to know about but they all subtract from that 4 gig maximum amount of memory that your windows 32 bit can use.

Charles

This is all sort of freaking me out. Suppose I decided one day that my 750GB external was no longer sufficient to have multiple backups of my 240GB internal hard drives. If I decided to go get a 2TB external and got to the store and was told that my computer can only handle 750GB, it would be annoying. I do not understand the internal RAM limitations. It would seem like more is better. What is it that can not handle the extra RAM? Why is there commentary above that I might get 3GB when the computer evaluation says I can only handle 2GB? I don't really fully understand this soft cap on RAM size.

Pepperfan

Tony,

At this point I would check with HP. The crucial memory tool is good and I use it for people all the time. But it is not perfect. HP may say that your computer will support more. I know that my HP xp8200 will support 16 gigabytes of ram. I stopped putting memory in at 4 gigs though because I am using Windows XP 32bit. If I want to go anyfurther I wlll have to upgrade to a 64 bit version of windows.

Check the computer statistics in your manual also It may tell you the max number.

Charles

joostvane

Quote:

What is the difference between DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. Also what is the 4-digit number like 5300? How do I know what I need to buy?

I'm not an expert, but this is what I think it is about.
DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 RAM are different versions of RAM. It is probably more stable and it has a faster connection. So your computer could access your RAM faster, so it will work faster.

About the 4 digit numbers: it is the mhz the RAM runs on. The higher, the faster.

But caution: your motherboard has limitations about wich RAM version it supports, and also about the maximum mhz it will be able to handle. Also I do not recommend buying DDR3 RAM since it is still very expensive and I don't think most PCs can fully profit of the speed of it. I have DDR3 RAM because I bought a new computer with an intel i7 core (i7 requires DDR3 RAM, and uses it 100% I think).

About the 32 bit vs 64 bit OS. Windows 32 bit os can only support 3.5 GB or so. So if you buy 4 GB, a little % of it will be useless unless you upgrade to Windows XP/Vista 64 Bit.

ForceRun

You also want to remember that you need to install your ram in pairs to get the speed boost of duel channeled ram. Which give you close to 2X the speed. Also the newest systems now use 3-channeled memory in the Core i7 systems. Yes Windows memory management sucks, but there is nothing you can do but upgrade to 64 bit.

Tony The Tiger

I have found that getting my Norton Internet Security fully operational has returned my performance to desired levels. I am not searching for RAM. Thanks for all the advice.